Becoming Political: Symbolist Literature and the Third Republic

Beginning in the early 1880s, the Third Republic pursued a cultural politics that increasingly placed the Symbolist esthetic in an oppositional position to norms promulgated by the government. The interest of Symbolists in the revolutionary politics of Boulangism in the late 1880s and in anarchism in the 1890s is a manifestation of Symbolism's oppositional place relative to Third Republic norms. The political dimension of Symbolism arose not because of its relationship to anarchism in the 1890s, but as a result of changes in the Third Republic. (RS)